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One visual image has come to symbolize Detroit's historic bankruptcy filing last week: a vacant, weatherbeaten home -- photographers have plenty to choose from -- standing abandoned in a weed-choked expanse.

OTTAWA — Ottawa is giving a boost to southwestern Ontario’s battered manufacturing sector with more than $1 billion in spending over the next two years to help the auto industry and build a new bridge to the U.S. at Windsor, Ont.
The federal budget Tuesday called for spending $631 million over the next two years to help build a new Detroit-Windsor crossing.

LOS ANGELES — Voyager 1 has crossed a new frontier, becoming the first spacecraft ever to leave the solar system, NASA said Thursday.
Thirty-six years after it was launched from Earth on a tour of the outer planets, the plutonium-powered spacecraft is more than 11 1/2 billion miles from the sun, cruising through what scientists call interstellar space – the vast, cold emptiness between the stars, the space agency said.

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — NASA launched a satellite late Thursday on a mission to explore a little-studied region of the sun and to better forecast space weather that can disrupt communications systems on Earth.

Detroit is one of America’s most troubled cities, and its problems sometimes seem intractable. But a new effort to envision a future for Motor City could offer hope to other declining urban centers.
Detroit epitomizes shrinking Rust Belt cities. The once-vibrant hub of the U.S. auto industry has already lost more than 60 percent of its population and about 40 percent of its housing stock, leaving roughly 20 square miles vacant – almost as much as all of Manhattan.

LOS ANGELES — Curiosity hunkered down after the sun unleashed a blast that raced toward Mars.
While the hardy rover was designed to withstand punishing space weather, its handlers decided to power it down as a precaution since it suffered a recent computer problem.
“We’re being more careful,” project manager Richard Cook of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Wednesday.
While Curiosity slept, the Opportunity rover and two NASA spacecraft circling overhead carried on with normal activities.